Ket hates the fact that this is the case. He fully remembers his own days as a street rat baggage carrier, and despite all the sabotage attempts of his so-called political allies, he keeps helping the ordinary people all he can. He has been paying rather well for a myriad of construction jobs. The powers that be might be in control of the main flow of gold and silver, but this does little to dissuade Ket from spending the hoard he has been gathering inside his spatial ring.
The crystal above the town is even now sucking up all the energy from enclosed spaces, allowing everyone a qi-free area to practice qi control in. This is not needed at the moment, but as the ambient qi levels rise, Ket knows that those energy poor spaces are going to be sought after. People staying inside Tree’s qi rich atmosphere for long stretches of time had been slowing down in terms of cultivation speed the longer they stayed down there. Even a brief stint on the Moon’s qi-sucking surface was usually enough to clear the obstructing ambient qi. Teach’s way of doing this is as profound as it is stupid to Ket. He understands that Teach is transferring this power to Tree through the crystals, but the way it is done is so simple, it’s wasteful.
Ket knows that there should be a better way to accomplish this but hasn’t found it so far. All the social mapping and cross-referencing he has needed to do over the past few weeks have left him with little energy to do anything else, especially since the people he initially insulted have started working against him.
The layout of the town is already circular. It occurred to him rather quickly that he could use the roads as formations. All he would need to do is to change several buildings, making artificial, miniature ley lines in order to guide the mana and qi flows to central positions. The council leading the city had gifted him an opulent set of rooms in the town’s central building, a castle housing the town’s rulers, of simple design. The first thing Ket did was to inscribe formations all over his bedroom. He suspects that there isn’t a single place for thousands of kilometres more secure than where he sleeps at night. It’s probably also the most qi-rich environment, as several of his formations have already been installed, guiding power into that single room from over half the town.
But the last few tasks he needs done are being obstructed by a myriad of problems, varying from outright sabotage to subtler means like briberies or purposefully wrong deliveries. The only two ways forward Ket has seen so far is either doing it himself or making things right with the upper echelons.
Because just as much as he has been learning about this weirdly cultured and advanced city, they have been struggling with how to deal with this immensely powerful person that has suddenly appeared. His control of metal – of which there is very little in the village – was enough to instantly repel the savage outbreak of the town’s well-bred stables. None can match Ket in martial mastery, so the showboating farces called duels stopped being issued after a single week.
And suddenly Ket realises where he has seen the droplet symbol. He has seen this ornament a few times, always worn by women, and always worn on the lower body. But those occurrences have been rather rare, and he has found several cases where the women wore it for just a few days.
Ket keeps rolling this single unknown around in his mind. The expected presentation of new crockery has a higher level of prestige than a pre-birthday party of some second girl turning fifteen, but the maid in front of him is rather early, giving him a bit of face. This single symbol might as well be the crucial tiebreaker that Ket needs.
He thinks about asking the woman a question, but he knows that lowering his standing like that would bring a lot of shame. And then there is the matter of the northside construction to consider. The work he issued in the outer rings of the city is progressing slowly but surely, but all tasks issued by him in the north are being halted in their tracks. Somehow, even the work orders he issued anonymously are sabotaged constantly. The day before, four construction workers got injured as a wooden beam suddenly snapped unexpectedly. Even the tasks he issued through a proxy are coming across this problem.
And both the BoneCarvers and MudGatherers are in fierce opposition to the clan ruling that area, so shunning them both publicly might cause these problems to cease.
Ket is developing another headache again by the time he has a sudden burst of clarity. The amount of powder on the BoneCarver’s face is thicker than usual. The bags under her eyes might be well covered but the puffiness of her eyes is less easy to hide. Her chest area is a fraction of a per cent larger than when Ket saw her last, and she is showing several micro expressions that subtly indicate pain or discomfort.
Then Ket has had enough. He stands up and steps down from the uncomfortable throne he has been gifted, taking the hand of the bowing maid. “Please tell your mistress that I will not be joining in any social affairs this week. Also, compliment her for her thoughtfulness. She sends a maid suffering from a recurring symptom just when I myself am not feeling too well.” Smiling down at the startled woman, he guides her to the door leading to the hallway. “This is bark tea. Please add one scoop to a cup of hot water. It will ease your pain.”
Closing the door himself after depositing the stunned and flabbergasted maid in the hallway, Ket walks to his bedroom. He sits on his bed, closing his eyes and breathing in deep as he rubs his face.
The absurdity that a noble would send a maid that’s currently on her period in order to insult him was the final straw. Instead of pondering how to worm his way back into everyone’s good graces, which is in hindsight a rather impossible task, he decides to think about how to get shit done.
Resolutely refusing to think about whether or not this is Teach’s influence, Ket decides that maybe a bit of chaos isn’t so bad now and then.
Meanwhile, in the hallway standing outside his room, the maid sent as a veiled insult and test calms her beating heart, hoping her furiously blushing face will not be visible under her makeup. She suppresses any thought of the immensely dashing and enigmatic young man as she returns home.
CHAPTER TEN
Intruding 1
“What an asshole.”
“I actually agree with you. He won’t even let us cut him open; allowing a few strands of our qi inside of himself is the least he can do, no?”
“PLEEEAAASSE LEEAAAVVEE.”
“And now he’s asking us to leave again. Incredibly rude.” Rhea nods emphatically as she sits on top of the sparkling slab of mystery metal.
“Super rude,” I distractedly add. The thing seems to be highly conscious of qi in all of its permutations, yet it seems to be infinitely less aware of the much finer energy known as augur. Rhea and I have been bombarding the thing with a steady stream of qi attacks in all shapes and sizes. From brute force streams of power to delicate probing strikes, and extremely powerful feints. None of them get through, but the sparkling stars inside the monolith are dimming slightly. It’s not at a level a mortal would notice, but the sheer amount of qi we’re throwing at the thing seems to be having some effect.
“Come on. Open up to us. Why do you need to keep us out like this?” Rhea is pouting, wiggling her shoulders while looking at the thing with puppy eyes. I stop myself from reaching my hand out and patting her cute little face, and keep my attention riveted to my infiltration attempts. In the meantime, a simple qi formation breaks all carbon-containing gasses free from their oxygen bonds, before letting them violently re-join. I’ve had this torch aimed at the same spot the entire time we’ve been here. Five hours, and the stone is still cold to the touch.
“Come on, dude. Don’t be a dick,” I admonish the stone. Keeping up a steady stream of random qi attacks, the burner, and my delicate augur probes is already taxing enough, so I don’t spare a lot of thought for good quality banter. I’ve managed to get the fine energy an entire two centimetres into the core, so it’ll take me a few weeks at most to figure out how this object works. Trying to push qi into the black rock is like splashing water onto piping hot marble. It sputters a bit before disappearing, but without extraor
dinary means, no headway can be made. I’m sure the mystical equivalent of waterjet cutting is possible, we just haven’t found it yet.
“PLEAAASE LEAAAVVE.”
“Look at you go. Your speech is getting better by the minute. I think some social interaction is doing you loads of good.”
I nod at this. “Good point, honey. You know what, anti-social loners like this fella here,” I pause to pat the smooth rectangle, forcefully ignoring its attempts to make parts of my hand disappear. “These types never do well under pressure. They always crack when you come at them hard and fast.”
“NOOOO.”
“I might’ve hit a nerve there. Why don’t you bring the poor guy out of its shell?” I turn to Rhea, stopping my own qi attacks and the burner. Pushing augur into its black surface feels like pushing a piece of rope through thick and chalky mud. I ignore the wide variety of sexual innuendos suggested by a certain process of mine and start attacking another point with augur.
“Grand idea! I’ll do so at once.” Grinning widely, her teeth are visibly growing pointy. Rhea then performs a needlessly complex set of flourishes and elegant gestures. A purple-tinged tube of distorted air spins into being, the side pointing away from the core opening up into a slight cone. Rhea makes another grand gesture, and fearing for the worst, I hide behind the rectangular solid and hold fast to its sides.
“WHYYYYY?”
“Wasn’t there some story about some mana mutant blowing down houses to get the shut-in little beasties to come out? Well, this is basically that exact story!” I want to retort to that horribly butchered version of an ancient fairy tale, but the words are blown out of my mouth as the air starts thundering around me at Rhea’s command. The strength of the high-powered gale surprises me, but it really shouldn’t have. How could I forget that Rhea is a wind dragon? I even learnt what emotions coincide with that facet of mana from her, for fuck’s sake. I keep holding on with all my might, using my heartcore-given strength to keep close to the dungeon core. Losing contact with my augur now would lose me several hours of hard work. And though it probably can’t see, sense, or influence that power right now, who knows what it can do when it is handed a nice sample of the energy free of my will?
I curse myself internally, for suggesting the idea, and Rhea, for actually going through with it. I’m about to grumble at the draconic woman a bit more when I suddenly halt any and all complaints. The augur that I’ve been worming inside the stupid rectangle’s underside with much effort suddenly sinks a bit deeper. I’d been probing the thing with another thread of augur in the meantime, hoping to find some form of weak spot. This thread has just sunk a full ten centimetres into its backside, the face that I am clinging to. This honestly hurts my pride a bit. My qi-powered Bunsen burner reached a temperature of a couple thousand degrees, and the stupid stone didn’t even react slightly. And now the strong breeze generated by Rhea suddenly has the stone shifting its defences around in order to protect itself.
Forcing myself to quit sulking, I shift my attention to my augur probe. It slides in with relative ease, a testament to how much the core is changing its internal defences around to deal with the gust Rhea is generating. The material the outer shell is made of is rather interesting. Someone or something somehow managed to interlock atoms inside each other, stacking atomic particles at the same density as a neutron star. This has caused the entire rectangle to become a single molecule, simply said. I can’t even see what the object is made of, so interwoven are the neutrons, protons, and electrons. The main resistance I’m feeling is not physical resistance but rather the strong force fighting me.
I swallow while not trying to think about the gravitational pull this thing should be exerting on my physical body. A single teaspoon of a neutron star weighs tens of millions of tonnes, so if this entire thing is made from the same material as its shell, it should weigh the same as a significant percentage of this planet. How is this thing not messing with tides?
Wait, this planet doesn’t have tides. I nearly forgot. The ocean doesn’t seem to be influenced by the moon’s orbit, at all. So why should this quadrillion tonne object make any difference, right?
Yes, science, please bend over so this planet can violate you some more.
I reign my thoughts back to the present – again. All these questions I haven’t been able to think up theories or probabilities to solve keep bouncing around in my head, distracting me. I tighten my grip on the extremely smooth rectangle I’m still hugging while the wind batters me. I feel tingles here and there as the core’s defence system tries to make parts of my body stop existing, without much effect. My eyelids flap to and fro as I try to catch a glimpse of Rhea. Instead, I see the spinning shield destabilising. The smaller half-sphere below us is already a wrinkled clump of fabric, and the large formation above us is quickly wobbling and warping in the fierce winds. I check my internal clock and notice that the moon should be halfway under the horizon by now.
This is quite the gamble. I resist centuries of instinct telling me to enter combat mode right the fuck now and press on. I ignore the impending doom that comes with the potentially failing shield, putting more pressure on my augur. A large portion of my braincore is filled with the elemental particles I’m mapping, and that area is slowly growing. I guide more augur through a hair-thin thread, letting it seep out of my core and through the back of my neck. That way, I limit the number of molecules I need to keep track of. I’d rather be forcibly made aware of large masses of air than to have more of the complex macromolecules of my own body shoved into the forefront of my mind, as scanning with augur tends to do.
I keep pushing more augur into the core, but the pressure is building up in more than one way. My braincore is slowly filling with the immensely compact number of elemental particles inside each square nanometre of the thing, and it’s pushing back against me. I quickly realize I’m stuck in a catch twenty-two. My sheer thinking capacity is being taken up by the hyper-compact nature of the core, and my willpower is being tested by keeping my augur steady while resisting the pushback. Either I increase the stability of my attack by widening the base, thus overloading my thinking capacity, or I keep pressing onwards with a narrow attack path, risking losing control of the entire thing.
Then I’m through. After hours of uselessly attacking the bottom, all that was needed to punch through the outer shell of the sparkling rectangle was an impressive-seeming, yet not truly dangerous, wind attack to distract it. I immediately shoot a strand of qi towards Rhea, willing meaning through the thread of power. “I’m in. Come.”
“Coming.”
Two seconds later, I feel a soft body smack into me before a process spools qi through my brain. Mentally blinking at the sudden whiplash that my consciousness experiences, I send a questioning inquiry towards the person who triggered that process. “The fuck?”
“Give me the data,” Rhea responds.
Only then do I notice that she is right there with me, thinking over a thousand times faster than reality, the real world crawling along a single second for every three hours of our time. “Alright, here. How is this a-”
“Yes, yes. My bad.”
“What’s your bad, honey?” I ask, unwilling to let this chance go.
The silence stretches between us as I pour over the data coming in from my augur. I pipe it through to Rhea the moment I receive it, letting us discover the joy that is this alien supercomputer architecture together.
“What is this?” Rhea asks me after a very silent ten minutes of mutual contemplation.
“I don’t even know,” I reply. “Are you just ignoring the fact that you are now allowed to break the ‘no time dilation’ rule?”
Rhea speaks up after another half an hour. “Is this supposed to make any sense?”
“I guess so? The thing seems to be working. Maybe it’s operating at a frequency we can’t observe? I don’t see anything moving,” I answer. “And we are ignoring the ‘no time dilation’ rule. Got it,” I can’t help but
add.
We study the core’s insides for a little longer before the silence is broken by a contemplative female voice. “How low can you go? I’m around five per cent of my maximum.” I can actually feel the smirk and raised eyebrow Rhea should be having right now, if her body could keep up with our current thinking speed.
“Don’t calculate it like that. Spool up and spool downtime becomes exponentially longer the deeper you go. Keep track of that when going down to, for example, a million times slower. You’ll need to add a couple hundred thousand extra subjective years if you don’t, otherwise.”
“That makes sense. Even the lightest substance will be like an unmoving stone at those speeds. Even a single atom will become an immovable object at sufficient dilation.”
“Something like that. Anyway, let’s try to slow down until this mess makes sense?”
“Who are you and where did my ‘don’t go into combat mode, nag, nag, nag’ Rhea go?”
“Oh, shut it. Let’s just see what’s truly going on.”
The stream of qi connecting us slowly starts intermingling, the edge between my neutral, almost invisible qi and her sharp and faintly purple power fading. Neither of us seems to care about keeping our fingerprinted qi separate. “Did you know that there was this sect patriarch that forced all his disciples to cultivate with his own qi? Pretty messed up.” Even though her eyes move with glacial speeds, I can feel her glare burning into the back of my head.
“Shut up, Drew,” is her resolute reply. “Why did you suddenly gain entry anyway? I haven’t got augur myself, but wasn’t your progress rather slow until now?”
“You scared it. Doesn’t this seem odd though? Hyper solid for the first couple centimetres, and then it’s just ordinary matter? Well, not ordinary. It’s still a couple times more compact than usual. What is this stuff even made of?”
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 9
